A blog about software development, server administration, and other IT related subjects. My goal is to find solutions to a number of undocumented or unsolved issues in order to help my readers out in any way I can. Main topics are: Nginx, PHP, MySQL, and Windows based software.

2011-11-08

Outlook 2007: replying to multiple emails or senders

Today, I received about 60 emails from my students who were handing in their assignments. Normally, I would just ask them to assume that I have received their emails correctly, but since we had trouble with the Internet connection, most of my students wanted to make sure I had received their work in due time. So I decided to send a kind confirmation reply to all the students that emailed me their work.

So here I go, opening Microsoft Outlook 2007, selecting multiple emails, right click to find the option "Reply to all" ... horror! It's not there! There's no apparent way to reply to all my students at once. What's worse is there isn't even an option to collect email addresses from people who emailed me (I would then have created one email with all recipients in BCC).

How it works, in a nutshell
After Googling it for about an hour, turns out there is no regular solution to perform such a basic operation. All the solutions I found involved installation of 3rd-party software OR installing and running complex macros. Uh, no thanks. I found some kind of simple workaround that requires no third-party software or macros. It's all in there, using advanced features.

Before I detail each step, here is the principle:

We create a "Message Template". This template will contain the email to be sent to everyone.

We place emails we wish to reply to into a specific category

We create a rule that automatically sends the email template we created in 1) to all the senders of the emails we selected in 2)

We apply that rule and send out the emails.

All of the above four steps are extremely simple and require no technical skills. Read on.

Creating a message template

Follow the simple instructions given below.

Instructions, as described on the image:

1) Write a regular email without a recipient

2) Click "Save As"...

3) Save it on your file system, making sure to select "Outlook Template" as a file type ("Save as type...")

Categorizing emails

The next step is to select the e-mails you want to reply to, and place them into a category.

This is the trickiest part so I'll write more detailed instructions. Creating and managing rules is done from the "Rules and Alerts" window. In order to access this window, on the main menu bar of Outlook 2007 go to "Tools" then "Rules and Alerts..."

To create the correct rule, follow the rule creation wizard which shows up when you click the "New Rule" button:

Selecting a Template. Under the "Start from a blank rule", select "Check messages when they arrive". Click next.

Selecting Conditions. Locate the "Assigned to category category" item and check it. As you check the box, a new item appears in the rule description. Click the underlined word "category" to be able to select which category of emails should be replied to. Click next.

Selecting Actions. Locate the option "Reply using a specific template" and check it. As you check the box, a new item appears in the rule description. Click the underlined part "a specific template", which will reveal the template selection window. At the top of this window, in the "Look in" drop-down list, select "User Templates in File System". Then you will be able to browse for the directory containing your template created in the first part of this tutorial. Once your template is selected correctly, click Next.

Specify a name for your rule. Below the rule name input box, you will find two checkboxes: "Run this rule now..." which you must enable; it will apply the rule to the folder currently selected in Outlook. Make sure to disable the "Turn on this rule" box, unless you want to automatically reply to similar messages in the future. Click Finish.

Upon clicking Finish, the rule will be applied: all the emails that you categorized will be replied to with the email template you selected previously. Click "Send/Receive" to send out the emails.

Conclusion

Voila! Was it so hard? I don't believe so. But Microsoft should have made it a lot easier to reply to multiple emails, it seems to me that this is quite basic functionality and it should have been available from the start.

Haha thanks for the nice comments. Again, the purpose of this blog is for me to write about stuff that I didn't find anywhere else (or that I found after searching for a LONG time). I can't believe that feature wasn't included in Outlook in the first place!

This is 100x better than Microsoft's supposed support! With them they tell me to "go look it up". One problem though that I'm having is that after running the rule, nothing appears in my outbox, ie the 100 email addresses don't show up there for me to send out. Anyone else have this problem?

Thanks! I know that functionality used to be there as I've used it in the past. Not sure why they would take away something so useful! You came up with a great work-around that I would've never thought of on my own.

In response to the person who claimed they had a problem sending more than 100 emails a day:

I believe the restriction is that you can't include more than 100 people on the same email. I think Microsoft built that in as an anti-spam feature. I'm not sure if this method gets around this because you're sending out individual emails. Alternately, if you break the group into groups that are smaller than 100 emails I'm sure you'll avoid the problem.

thank you so much, I used your instructions w/ Outlook 2003, only difference that is possible is when creating template:

If there is no option to safe as an oft-file, you are probably using Outlook 2003 or previous and have Word set as the email editor. In order to get the oft-file option, you’ll need to set Outlook as your e-mail editor (Tools-> Options..-> tab Mail Format).